On my eeePC I have a tiny 32G SSD which is on a miniPCIe card. To "save" write cycles (and space - 32G is not that much space) I kept portage on an 8GB SDHC card that I keep plugged into the card reader. I wonder when this SDHC card will start developing errors...

Note that the smaller the media, the less space to play with, the sooner it will wear out.

On a similar note, I do have Portage tree installed on my 128G and 180G "regular" SSDs, and knock on wood, no problems yet either._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

I'm up to 61 emerge --sync's on my 128GB Crucial M4 that I've complained about in the past for other issues (in OTW). No problems yet. I'm still at 4 erase cycles average on this laptop._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?

emerge --sync is just a bunch of small files - nothing to be worried about. I have 8GB of ram and use a 4GB tmpfs for /var/tmp (where the magic happens). Additionally I use a tmpfs for /var/log, /run and /tmp.

I have portage (and distfiles) on an nfs share and only sync on that server.
I also use /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs wherever enough ram is available because it's usually much faster than a disk. Sometimes I even cheat and make the tmpfs larger than the actual ram and back it up via a swapfile, if it really, really needs to have more! _________________Power to the people!

I am not so sure about that 8GB SDHC card, but yes I would think the regular SSDs should not have a problem. I tend to build in tmpfs when I can, so that helps. But firefox doesn't fit on the tmpfs so I am forced to use the SSD or some external storage.

I do wonder, however, since portage stores little small files here and there, how badly fragmented the on-chip representation will show up later as the SSD runs out of clean erase blocks. But since rsync only copies over changed files, I suppose the clean block burn rate is actually a lot slower than I thought, just that the freed storage blocks are now going to be scattered all over an erase block, and GC could take a while to collate the holes... but still, I'd think more people would vote "Yes, no problems yet" as I voted, and not as many "No F****** way" !!!

Anyway, I think my 32G SSD in my eeePC is way too small for how much storage I'm using on it, fortunately the burn rate is not too high. And I guess I don't care too much if that SDHC card dies, it was meant to be the sacrificial anode._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed watching?